This invention relates generally to determining airline seat availability information for use in travel planning and travel reservation systems.
Airlines institute selling policies that can change to meet supply and demand considerations to maximize profit on any given flight. When a passenger specifies an itinerary, the itinerary has one or more flight segments. In order to issue a ticket for a single or multi-flight segment itinerary, each flight segment must be available. That is, each flight segment must have seats that have not been already reserved for other passengers. Availability can also be governed by whether an airline will sell to a particular passenger given characteristics of the passenger. Common characteristics which are used by airlines to decide whether or not to sell a ticket is the price that the passenger is willing to pay for the ticket, whether the passenger is using other flights on that airline, whether the passenger is a frequent flyer and so forth.
Generally, before booking a flight and issuing a ticket, the seller can send a request for availability information to the airline. In general, a request for availability is sent over a computer network to an airline and is processed in the airline""s computer system. An answer to the request is provided from the system. Commonly, a message is returned to the seller. The message includes one or possibly a plurality of so-called booking codes that are labels used to designate different prices that an airline is willing to sell tickets at. Associated with these booking codes or labels are often a number of seats that the airline is willing to sell in each booking code. For example, a common booking code is the xe2x80x9cYxe2x80x9d booking code and the message may contain Y/25 meaning the Y booking code has 25 seats. A second booking code may be the xe2x80x9cQxe2x80x9d booking code and may contain a message which says Q/0 meaning that the Q booking code has 0 seats available. Although the exact meaning of booking codes may vary from carrier to carrier, in general most carriers will use Y booking codes corresponding to an expensive coach class fare and a Q booking code as an inexpensive coach class fare. The airline would make the seat at the Y booking code available, i.e., a higher profit booking code, rather than make the seat available at the Q booking code, i.e., a lower profit fare.
Conventionally, travel agents and computer reservation services look-up a limited number of flight options. Thus, having an airline check on availability for those flights and asking a computer reservation service to perform a fare search for such flights involves a small number of availability checks, low latency and is generally acceptable. However, new algorithms have been produced for performing so-called xe2x80x9clarge scalexe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9clow fare searchesxe2x80x9d that iterate over a large number of flight possibilities and therefore would require looking up availability information and performing fare searches over the flight and available booking codes for many hundreds if not thousands of possible combinations. Since there is a computational expense, as well as an economic expense, involved in obtaining availability information, it is desirable to minimize this expense as much as possible. While it is necessary for good travel planning to look at many possible flight combinations such as hundreds or possibly thousands, it is undesirable to return to a traveler who requested such flight combinations large numbers of flights for which no seats are in fact available. Therefore, the need for availability information is present with a low fare search or large scale search algorithms. However, the current availability infrastructure does not allow for easy access to such queries which could take many minutes and possibly hours at high processing and economic costs.
According to an aspect of the invention, a computer program product residing on a computer readable medium includes instructions for causing a computer to produce a prediction of availability of a seat on an airline flight in accordance with an availability query.
The computer program product provides a prediction of availability by accessing a database of stored query answers to produce a prediction in response to the query. The computer program product can determine whether the availability query corresponds to or is similar to a query stored in the database. The product also retrieves the stored answer associated with a query stored in the database that corresponds to or is similar to availability query or otherwise send an actual availability query to the airline reservation system. The computer program product can use a model based predictor to provide a prediction of the answer to the query if there is no availability query found in the database. The computer program product can parse the availability query to produce a set of features for use by an availability model, determine features of the availability query, and apply selected ones of the determined features of the query to an availability model. The computer program product can simulate an airline""s availability system to provide a predicted answer of availability. The computer program product can access a database that has probability estimates stored as a function of booking codes.
According to a further aspect of the invention, a method for providing availability information for a seat on an airline includes producing a prediction of availability of the seat in accordance with an availability query.
According to a still further aspect of the invention, a system for producing an availability answer in response to a query for airline seat availability information includes a predictor that is responsive to the query and produces an answer that corresponds to a prediction of airline seat availability.
The current process provides a technique to substitute predictions of availability for actual availability responses. Availability predictions are based upon several conceptual types of models which can be used separately or in various combinations. These models include a predictor based upon a cache or a database of stored availability queries and answers to the availability queries. The queries are used to identify when a stored query is the same as a received query request, and the answers are used as a substitute for direct access for future identical or substantially related queries.
A second approach uses predictive models of availability that are based upon parametric statistical models that use historical data, as well as, recent queries and may also include deterministic rule based models. In addition, the predicted model and the cache of available queries can be used in combination to improve the overall performance of the availability predictor.
A third approach simulates an airline""s availability system or uses a direct connection to an availability process that is run as a local process to a low fare search or large scale search algorithm process. Thus, for example, a computer program is developed that simulates an airline""s particular availability system. The program can be developed by using known data or system responses that can be reverse engineered. The simulated availability system can provide predicted answers to availability queries. In addition, airlines can provide their availability software for direct access by the low fare or the large scale search processes.
The availability predictor or the availability system is particularly advantageous to run as a local process to a server that performs travel planning. With such a server that produces a large number of possible flight combinations and associated fares, the availability predictor or availability system can be used to retain those pricing solutions (i.e., itinerary-fare combinations) that have a realistic chance of being available.